[Foundation-l] Request for your input: biographies of living people

[Tomasz Ganicz]

2009/3/2 Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been increasingly concerned lately about Wikimedia's coverage of living
> people, both within biographies of living people (BLPs) on Wikipedia, and in
> coverage of living people in non-BLP text.  I've asked the board to put this
> issue on the agenda for the April meeting in Berlin, and I'm hoping there to
> figure out some concrete next steps to support quality in this area.  In
> advance of that, I want to ask for input from you.
>

I think that:
*There should be official Foundation's policy about handling legal
problems with biographies of living persons, which should have similar
status like privacy policy. It should be legal document saying what to
do if... not just a set of advices for editors. Moreover it should
clearly state whom to contact on Foundation level, who is responsible
for content etc. it should be written by lawyer.
*BLP policy on Wikipedia-en (and probably on many others) is rather
internal policy for editors describing not the legal issues but rather
editing rules - they might be different on different project, moreover
they use to change over the time.
*These two things of course overlap - but they are two different
issues in fact.
*It should be made clear that the offical Foundation policy regarding
legal issues with BLPs is more important than local BLP's policies and
always comes first.

In particular the legal BLP Foundation policy should give an answer for:
*what to do if a person want to remove enitre biography from Wikipedia
- especially in cases when a person is not formally a "public person"
but he/she is somehow famous
*what to do if a person claims that a given information hurts him/her
life but it is well proved by sources - and what sources are
acceptable and what not.
*what to do if a person says his/her biography is wrong but rejects to
provide proves or sources of their claims
*what kind of information should never be put on biography because it
is personal even if someone found public sources for them (like E-mail
and real address, phone number, illnesses,  etc.)

Two recent examples from Polish Wikipedia:
*A sportsmen had anitdoping case around 5 years ago, when he was 18.
There is good source of this information (his own interwiev in sport's
magazine in which he appologises for taking an illegal drug). Now the
guy is saing that it was all forgotten by mainstream media, he was
already punished for this (6 months break)  but he is now trying to
get new contract and Wikipedia entry on him may destroy the deal.
Therefore he ask for removing this info or his entire bio...
*A pop singer manager wants to remove the birthday of his starllet,
because she is (probably) around 30 but her current image show her as
"almost teenager". The birhtday is sourced by "Who is Who in Poland",
paper eddtion - but it was removed from electronic version, and they
also manged to remove it from all other web-pages.


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html